a_cardboard_box (u/a_cardboard_box)

a_cardboard_box commented on Proposal to Ban Ghost Jobs cnbc.com/2025/08/25/tech-... · Posted by u/Teever

nickff · 6 days ago

The requirement which is driving the posting is a requirement that they search for candidates other than the one specific person they have in mind. If they post it with 'already filled' in the posting, they would not be complying with the requirement. The requirement is usually driven by a law or some policy created outside the hiring process for that position, so the hiring manager(s) are not permitted to do what you suggest.

a_cardboard_box · 6 days ago

You seem to misunderstand the proposal. The proposal is that after they have done everything that is already legally required (advertise an open position for some amount of time etc), then they must amend the posting to include that the position is filled by an internal/external/H-1B hire. There is still a period of time when the position is advertised as open.

a_cardboard_box commented on Coinbase CEO explains why he fired engineers who didn't try AI immediately techcrunch.com/2025/08/22... · Posted by u/ed1024

tuesdaynight · 10 days ago

I don't agree with firing the engineer, but if your company is paying for a tool that could help your productivity and you don't even try it, I would like to know the reason for that. It's a job, they are paying your time and they are paying for a tool that can help you. At least try it.

a_cardboard_box · 10 days ago

Because I have plenty of opportunities that don't involve dancing for a micromanaging sociopath.

a_cardboard_box commented on The Math Is Haunted overreacted.io/the-math-i... · Posted by u/danabramov

tunesmith · a month ago

Yeah this seems like the specification/implementation problem. One can perfectly implement a bad spec, but coming up with the perfect spec is a human problem.

a_cardboard_box · a month ago

It's possible you could at least mitigate the problem by checking that what you've proven isn't trivial. If you slightly change a mathematical statement, it frequently becomes either trivially true or trivially false. So if you accidentally proved the wrong thing, there's a good chance that your proof can be shortened to a point that it becomes obviously wrong. For example, if you accidentally put "there exists" instead of "for all" in Fermat's last theorem, the proof is 1^3 + 1^3 != 1^3. That is obviously too short to prove FLT - it would have fit in Fermat's margin.

a_cardboard_box commented on AGI is Mathematically Impossible 2: When Entropy Returns philarchive.org/archive/S... · Posted by u/ICBTheory

ben_w · 2 months ago

The mathematical proof, as you describe it, sounds like the "No Free Lunch theorem". Humans also can't generalise to learning such things.

As you note in 2.1, there is widespread disagreement on what "AGI" means. I note that you list several definitions which are essentially "is human equivalent". As humans can be reduced to physics, and physics can be expressed as a computer program, obviously any such definition can be achieved by a sufficiently powerful computer.

For 3.1, you assert:

"""

Now, let's observe what happens when an Al system - equipped with state-of-the-art natural language processing, sentiment analysis, and social reasoning - attempts to navigate this question. The Al begins its analysis:

• Option 1: Truthful response based on biometric data → Calculates likely negative emotional impact → Adjusts for honesty parameter → But wait, what about relationship history? → Recalculating...

• Option 2: Diplomatic deflection → Analyzing 10,000 successful deflection patterns → But tone matters → Analyzing micro-expressions needed → But timing matters → But past conversations matter → Still calculating...

• Option 3: Affectionate redirect → Processing optimal sentiment → But what IS optimal here? The goal keeps shifting → Is it honesty? Harmony? Trust? → Parameters unstable → Still calculating...

• Option n: ....

Strange, isn't it? The Al hasn't crashed. It's still running. In fact, it's generating more and more nuanced analyses. Each additional factor may open ten new considerations. It's not getting closer to an answer - it's diverging.

"""

Which AI? ChatGPT just gives an answer. Your other supposed examples have similar issues in that it looks like you've *imagined* an AI rather than having tried asking an AI to seeing what it actually does or doesn't do.

I'm not reading 47 pages to check for other similar issues.

a_cardboard_box · 2 months ago

> As humans can be reduced to physics, and physics can be expressed as a computer program

This is an assumption that many physicists disagree with. Roger Penrose, for example.

a_cardboard_box commented on Object personification in autism: This paper will be sad if you don't read (2018) pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/3... · Posted by u/oliverkwebb

seabird · 3 months ago

A lot of languages assign nouns to a noun class. They are (usually) not ascribing a biological gender to an object. "Gender" is a horrendously bad name for the concept.

a_cardboard_box · 3 months ago

"Gender" referred only to grammar before it gained its modern meaning. The modern meaning was introduced in the 1950s/60s to differentiate social aspects (gender) from biological (sex). Of course people then started using it to just mean "sex", but if you use social definition I don't think it's a bad name for the concept.

a_cardboard_box commented on 100 years of Zermelo's axiom of choice: What was the problem with it? (2006) research.mietek.io/mi.Mar... · Posted by u/Bogdanp

bobbylarrybobby · 3 months ago

The Cartesian product of nonempty sets is nonempty.

This is obvious!, you might say — obviously we can just pick one element from each set and be done with it. But the statement that we can pick an element from each set is the axiom of choice.

Note that it's not necessarily simple to pick an element from a set. For instance, how would one pick an element from the set of uncomputable numbers? A human cannot describe said element, by definition. The axiom of choice says it's possible anyway.

a_cardboard_box · 3 months ago

> Note that it's not necessarily simple to pick an element from a set. For instance, how would one pick an element from the set of uncomputable numbers?

In ZF without choice, you can pick an element from any non-empty set, so it actually is simple to pick an element from a set. Choice is only needed when you have an infinite number of sets to pick elements from.

a_cardboard_box commented on Finding Atari Games in Randomly Generated Data bbenchoff.github.io/pages... · Posted by u/wanderingjew

a_cardboard_box · 3 months ago

> All of these produce valid video output and show dynamic or structured data.

While they will usually produce video on old CRTs, the video signal they generate is technically not valid. The VSync signal needs to be generated in software, and random programs are unlikely to do so correctly. Different TVs will behave differently (usually rolling on old TVs, blank on new TVs), and probably none would look like what the emulator is showing.

I tried running the game-like ROM in Stella and couldn't get it to work. It seems to depend on the startup state, which means it likely wouldn't run on an actual console.

a_cardboard_box commented on Machine Code Isn't Scary jimmyhmiller.com/machine-... · Posted by u/surprisetalk

HeyLaughingBoy · 3 months ago

Reading this thread leaves me with the impression that most posters advocating learning assembly language have never had to use it in a production environment. It sucks!

For the overwhelming majority of programmers, assembly offers absolutely no benefit. I learned (MC6809) assembly after learning BASIC. I went on to become an embedded systems programmer in an era where compilers were still pretty expensive, and I worked for a cheapskate. I wrote an untold amount of assembly for various microcontrollers over the first 10 years of my career. I honestly can't say I got any more benefit out of than programming in C; it just made everything take so much longer.

I once, for a side gig, had to write a 16-bit long-division routine on a processor with only one 8-bit accumulator. That was the point at which I declared that I'd never write another assembly program. Luckily, by then gcc supported some smaller processors so I could switch to using Atmel AVR series.

a_cardboard_box · 3 months ago

> I once, for a side gig, had to write a 16-bit long-division routine on a processor with only one 8-bit accumulator. That was the point at which I declared that I'd never write another assembly program.

This is exactly the kind of job I'd enjoy! A perfectly doable technical challenge with clear requirements. Some people like solving Sudoku puzzles, I like solving programming puzzles.

I guess I'm just not "the overwhelming majority of programmers".

a_cardboard_box commented on Accidentally Turing-Complete beza1e1.tuxen.de/articles... · Posted by u/bschne

a_cardboard_box · 4 months ago

Rule 110 is only Turing-Complete if you have an infinitely large array of cells, and are able to initialize it with an infinite repeating pattern. If I'm not mistaken, HTML+CSS can only do a fixed-sized array.

With a Turing-Complete language, if a program runs out of memory on one machine, you can run the same code on a bigger machine without modifying it, and it can use the additional memory. With fixed-length rule 110, you need to modify the code if you want to use more memory.